The bad thing about genetics

My mom has great teeth, great eyesight (until she got older, which causes most people to go farsighted), no real joint problems, things like that. My dad has bad teeth, bad eyes, a bad back, bad knees, bad joints. Of those problems, my brothers and sister have bits and pieces. And then there's me. Bad teeth, bad eyes, bad knees, bad back, bad joints. I got them all. Apparently he must love me most because he passed this all on to me (at least that's the thought I comfort myself with when I'm in pain because of one of my problems). :D

Along with just having weak teeth, I have a weakness for soda, and I know it doesn't do my teeth any favors. In addition to that, Jason and I went about eight years without dental insurance, so I had a lot of little problems that began way back then that I wasn't able to take care of when they were little. For the last three to four years, we've had dental, so I've been maxing out my insurance every year trying to get my mouth back into the kind of order where I can actually chew on both sides of my mouth. My biggest problem actually started way back when Lindsay was born. During pregnancy I craved ice--never craved it before or after, but I would just go buy a cup of ice and munch on it like it was candy. That usually lasted until the baby was about a week old. So while I was munching on my last cup of ice after Lindsay was born, I chipped a tooth. It really wasn't that big of a deal (and this is during the period of no insurance so I couldn't afford to take care of it), I just had to be careful because food would get trapped back in there. Fast forward a couple years, I flew up to Seattle to visit my best friend and the pressure on the airplane caused me to have a massive toothache during my visit. So when I got back home, we had to scrape together money for me to get a root canal done. I felt better after, but we couldn't afford the crown, so I just left that tooth alone with the massive filling intending to get the crown when we could afford it. Three years later, we're here in Arizona, finally have dental insurance, but that tooth is so weak now that it has begun to crumble around the filling. My dentist, who is in our ward and is the most compassionate man and who's judgment I trust, suggested that he may not be able to save that tooth anyway, so we should work on the rest of my mouth trying to get it in good condition before we start maxing out my insurance on just that tooth. This whole time, I haven't really been able to eat on that side of my mouth because I knew it was weak and I tried to preserve it. Unfortunately, that made it so that I had a ton of cavities on the other side of my mouth because it's not compensating. So we start doing all kinds of filling work, meanwhile that tooth just keeps getting in worse and worse condition. Finally, about eighteen months ago, I had him just extract it because I couldn't deal with it anymore and it was causing too many problems. So I've had a gap in the back of my mouth for the last year and a half and still can't eat on that side, but I haven't had the pain or aggravation of that tooth. So about a year ago, we start to discover that the tooth next to that tooth, and the very rear tooth on the bottom side of my mouth, has a problem. I'm not really feeling the problem most of the time because I'd had a root canal done on that tooth when I was eighteen. He actually couldn't even see it in the x-rays, but you know how dentists are, and when I told him I had some sensitivity back there (and he was like, you can't possibly be sensitive, there's no root), he tapped on the tooth and it hurt so much I was almost in tears. So that's how we discovered that I needed to have another root canal done on that tooth.

Yesterday, I had that root canal done and the prep work on a bridge (so that I actually won't even have a gap back there anymore). I thought since there's no root it wouldn't be as bad. And oh, boy, I was wrong. Apparently the decay had set in under my gums buried in my jaw, so I've got this really deep ache in the middle of my jaw. The nice thing about my dentist, though, is that he actually just called me to check on me--woke me up from my nap since I've been trying to just sleep it off. And he was saying the pain shouldn't last too much longer. And, of course, the best part is that in a couple weeks they're putting in the permanent bridge so I won't have to deal with the gap any more and all of my teeth will finally be cavity free. I think that's the first time in almost ten years that I could actually say that.

Oh, and a cruel trick of fate--Jason still hadn't gone to the dentist (had been almost ten years for him), so I finally bugged him enough to get him in the chair last year. He had two small cavities. That's it! I go every six months and wind up with new cavities, and my dear husband doesn't go for years and has two small ones. Let's hope the kids have the genetics of his teeth.